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 From bouncer and accountant to the toughest woman in comedy, JULIA WILSON is here to tell us all about her true-life tales in her Scarred Not Scared tour. GEMMA MUMFORD reports.
Wilson’s journey to becoming a comedian certainly wasn’t planned, as the performer reveals. “I was a bouncer working in some pretty rough parts of Sydney by night and then an accountant by day and pretty much just thought to myself, ‘this is weird, I think I need a change.’” An enrolment into music school and a few performances later, Wilson won the Triple J Raw Comedy competition state final with flying colours – and the rest is history.
Wilson prides herself on “seeing things a little differently than most other people”, and uses her real life experiences to crack her audiences. “I get myself into some weird situations, like when I was in South Africa and a lion wouldn’t let go of my hand or the broken fingers from my bouncer days … these true stories all make for an entertaining show.” Wilson sees her scars as trophies and they remind her of some seriously dangerous fun.
After touring the globe for the past four years – from South Africa to Europe and Canada – Wilson is back on home turf with more scars and more stories. “I love Australia and I haven’t seen much of my own country. I’ve been travelling around the world for a while now and I feel it’s time to come back home until my feet start to itch again. I want to reach out to people in rural communities, country folk, they don’t get much comedy out there. I’ll be doing the cities as well.”
When asked about her time overseas, she talks more about the South African experience than anything else, recalling the first shows she ever did. “There aren’t many female entertainers over there, so my first show was a bit weird, people were shocked to see a white, Australian woman with a scary and confronting voice on the stage, I think people would just come to see the token scary woman with a loud voice. I cottoned on to this and so discovered the best way to reach my audience was to structure the show. So I set it up at the beginning for them, I talked them through it all. ‘Ok, so this is what we do in Australia, we do things a little differently’, and once I stopped freaking them out the shows were amazing, I had audiences of like 1200.”
Wilson is definitely not a comedian that talks of “kittens, ex-boyfriends or tampons” – she talks of kicking people out of clubs and things a lot filthier. Besides comedy, Wilson is also an actress and has appeared in the Aussie film Oyster Farmer and the Australian television series of Love My Way. Now she knows what her calling is (performing to people) she is not afraid to unleash to her audiences and show off a few of those “scars”.
JULIA WILSON’s SCARRED NOT SCARED shows will take in Metro Arts on Wednesday May 14 and then the Del Plaza Hotel at Southport on May 15. Tickets can be purchased from www.juliawilson.com.au
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